That was me 
, and I was instantly reminded of that remark when opening this thread.
The thing is, I can dance to almost all pop, rock, country or soul music, but for the life of me I can’t dance to reggae, one of the most danceable music genres. Millions dance to it, but I just can’t do it.
ETA: I can dance to ska just fine…
Aw, shit! Great story but I came in here to mention Rush. Almost none of their tunes are danceable unless you’re completely pixelated.
I was in a disco in the late 70’s and people were dancing to Pink Floyd. Easier to do than Rush songs but just as weird.
That’s why they put out the compilation “A Collection Of Great Dance Songs” .
Really, the only Floyd song you can dance to is “Another Brick In The Wall Part 2”. It’s their disco song.
A friend is a huge Grateful Dead fan. When he got married, he insisted all the music at the reception be Dead songs. Nobody was dancing. The bride asked me to ask some of the women to dance. I did, but none of us knew how to move to those songs. Do you have to be high?
Is it the popular “one-drop” rhythm that confuses you? In that the one is often an “empty” beat with no kick on it? Or is it not really a matter of not feeling the one, but rather just not feeling a proper dance movement to go along with the beats?
Not much of a Dead fan here, but I just shuffle my feet to the beat and just bob my head and sway my body. As I said above, I’m a swayer, not really a dancer (though I’ve taken some classic dance lessons WAAYY back when. I think I still remember the cha-cha.) You can certainly do a proper dance to something like “Sugar Magnolia.”
Anyhow, having the bride & groom choose all their favorite music at a reception is often a recipe for disaster. I do weddings for a living (as a photographer), and I have been to a few where the B&G just wanted their very personally curated song list of indie favorites at their wedding, and the dance floor has been a disaster every single time. Modest Mouse and the Postal Service don’t really get a dancefloor going. Sprinkled through the set, though, it can work. Let the DJ read the crowd.
I think the trick is that while many of these musical numbers can’t easily be “danced to,” I can think of a ton of ways to choreograph for them. Some could be very interesting from a modern dance perspective.
I think this would be tricky to dance to:
Ludwig Van Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in C Minor (Full) - YouTube
It’s probably all of that, I just can’t get into the groove and don’t know how and when to move my feet to reggae, while the movements to a 4/4 beat just come naturally. I’m not a great dancer anyway, though like you I took classical dance lessons when I was a teenager. I still can do the waltz in pairs, though.
I stand doubly delightfully corrected.
Well, that album came out about 3 years after my story.
And dancing to a song about kids getting abused is fuggin’ weird.
Like when I saw a couple slow dancing to “Dear Mr Jesus”. Not kidding, I saw that once.
As your examples prove, music in odd time signatures can be danced to.
Thinking about this, I initially suspected that frequent meter changes would be impossibly challenging, but this…
… proves it’s perfectly doable, too.
If you have seen a sultry country gal in shorts dancing wildly to the guitar refrain in “Green Grass and High Tides Forever” you realize that anything is a dance tune. And you can’t do it, but she can. Right, Beck?
Phillip Glass? I suppose one could choreograph a routine to a piece, but it ain’t really dancing.
The classical examples (the “waltz with a limp” from Tchaikovsky 5 & Stravinsky Rite) are good. There is actually quite a bit of classical music with either irregular time signatures, or time signatures that change within the piece. Rachmaninov was a bit fond of this: Isle of the Dead is in 5/4, and the Vocalise starts in common time, then goes to 2/4, then back to common time. I have just been listening to Bruckner 6, and the finale to that sounds as if it keeps going into different metres – it definitely goes through lots of extreme tempo changes, which I suspect would make it impossible to dance. (His music also has a lot of lengthy pauses, and I don’t know what dancers would do during those.) I imagine La Mer by Debussy would also be tough choreographically. However, I think a ballet has been made of the Faun, so what do I know.
When I was learning cello I briefly tried to learn a piece for unaccompanied cello by Ross Edwards, I think it was. I gave up on this partly because the time signature kept changing, practically from bar to bar! (Also, like a lot of contemporary music, there was no “pattern” or discernible melody to it, and I just found it too difficult to latch onto. No reflection on RE, whose music I admire a lot.)
Since you’re a cellist, is your username a reference to this guy ?
My suggestion is “Pictures of a City” from King Crimson’s In the Wake of Poseidon. I think you can dance to parts of it, but I doubt anyone could dance to all of it.
You got me! Emmanuel Feuermann was IMHO a better (although “cooler”) cellist than Casals. Feuermann, although a great player, was a terrible teacher. Apparently "a compliment from Feuermann was something along the lines of ‘Well, it’s beginning to sound like a cello, almost!’ ". Many anecdotes from his pupils are collected at Brinton Smith Thesis on Emanuel Feuermann Chapter Five .
I’m surprised to have gotten through the thread a seen no mention of Led Zeppelin’s Black Dog, for which they band members have gone on record as having ‘set out to write a song that nobody can dance to’ specifically because they hated Disco. In fact, the beat diminishes with every bar of the stanza, then replenishes with the next stanza to diminish again.
My wife used to shout “Black Dog!” when we were at bars and the bands asked for suggestions. She couldn’t understand why the frontmen would just roll their eyes at her and ask for someone else to call out a request. She didn’t even believe me when I explained that nobody would be getting up to dance to that. I had to send her YouTube links that explain it.
–Grestarian (the wanderer)
For decades the youth of the UK would watch Top of the Pops on a Thursday evening on BBC TV. To listen to the music in the pop charts.
Initially, in an era before promotional videos were commonplace, bands and artists would appear on the show and mime to their songs. However for artists who could not appear there was a dancing troupe (they changed the group a few times over the years) who would do a routine.
Rock bands on world tours often created the situation where they were not capable of appearing while their music was not ideal for dancing but the dancers would try…
For example Deep Purple and Fireball (the host here is Jimmy Saville who after his death was outed as a rapist and child molester making his flirting here with young women rather distasteful) with Pan’s People dancing.
Here is Rush and Spirit of the Radio and the later dance troupe of Legs and Co. Since this is a later era the dancers are now using ADVANCED special effects and some pre-recorded stuff to liven it up.
TCMF-2L